


Shadowlands

by the_blue_fairie



Category: The Wicked Years Series - Gregory Maguire, Wicked - All Media Types, Wicked - Schwartz/Holzman
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2019-12-26 23:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 18,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18292172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_blue_fairie/pseuds/the_blue_fairie
Summary: Elphaba has been in the Resistance for what seems an eternity now, and despite the blood on her hands, she thinks that she is doing the right thing... until she is given orders to assassinate Glinda. Booksical. Gelphie.





	1. Chapter 1

 

It had been a simple thing, the death of a traitor.

He had given names. Why, had been irrelevant. The only relevant thing had been that he was there in that barren grey room, bound to a chair, with their shadowed faces all around him.

Only _his_ face was unveiled, and his face was as white as the heart of a flame, as white as the heart of the flame flickering beside that grimy chair in that dingy room.

Elphaba had not known if his face had been white from fear or from exhaustion. Sweat had dripped from his brow like white wax, but they had used him unkindly before bringing him to that place, so perhaps it had been simple fatigue.

There had been so much that Elphaba had not bothered to ask, had not cared to ask. Had the Gale Force found his true name, something even the other members of his cell did not know? Had they threatened his family?

Had he wanted to save them? Did he consider that cowardice or bravery?

He was unnaturally quiet, she remembered. Was that in acceptance of his fate? Did he feel guilty and want to be absolved of guilt through death? Was it in hopelessness, despair? Were his last thoughts of his daughter thrown to whatever horror the Wizard might contrive? Or were they of his comrades, those he knew he had betrayed?

His had been a silent, inscrutable face – but its flatness, its simplicity, had been so beguiling. A part of her had wanted to take an hour to read that face, but that would have been impractical and foolishly sentimental.

Besides, there was no time for that.

The deed had to be done quick, and then they would disperse, as spectral as the shadows the candle made dance upon the wall.

There had been talk about how they were going to do it – what would make the least noise, what would be the least messy. They had brought him to a dunghill. Its population was sparse. Still, there were a few eyes and ears out there, a few tongues that might dare to wag…

“Strangle him,” she had said.

But she had not done it herself. Greater hands than hers, thickly gloved, had closed around his throat. Even so, she watched him to the end in a kind of piteous contempt. He had hurt them all and so hurt her, and this was justice. Brutal, but it was. At that point in time, the justice was of greater weight on the scales of her heart – but for there to be any struggle in the scales, the brutality must have weighed down too. Mustn’t it have?

Perhaps she had thoughts then, in that dark room. Perhaps her thoughts now were roiling the thoughts she once had and tipping the scales of certainty.

Perhaps the whole muddy mess of life in the Resistance was becoming too much of a tumultuous storm – a tumult of mixed metaphors a high-minded scholar would simply screech at in the hallowed halls of Shiz.

Dear old Shiz.

Elphaba laughed hollowly.

Impossible for that not to come into her mind, impossible for… memories… not to come back…

Past and present were a fen to drown in, weren’t they?

Was it simple now?

It had been simple then.

Had it even been simple then?

Maybe it had been, maybe it hadn’t… but that had been a face in the faceless sea of the Resistance and this… this was Glinda.

Glinda… who had thrown in her lot with the Wizard…

Glinda, who even now was standing before a crowd, happily spewing the Wizard’s rhetoric with a smile…

That smile…

The memories _hurt_.

_Glinda smiling at her…_

_Glinda taking her hand in hers…_

_Glinda’s head resting against her shoulder…_

_The softness of their first kiss…_

_Their bodies entwining, raven hair entangling with gold…_

And she could not.

Elphaba just… could not…

She knew, though, that if she could not kill her, another would. Another faceless shadow from her cell. Someone to whom Glinda was nothing more than another one of the Wizard’s propogandists.

She felt the shifting in the crowd.

The corners of her eyes stung, anticipating the thunder of a gunshot from another sniper – there were crannies in which to lurk, she had found one, her comrades could easily find others, she knew right well they had –

As she delayed, were they preparing –

And in that moment, Elphaba made a decision. Knowing that she no longer knew what she was doing. Knowing, that whatever she was doing, it was folly. Knowing that there was no way out, that **_she_** was the traitor now, that this was madness and that uncertainty was her only certainty and it was all so… painfully ridiculous.

And she felt herself diving down like a great black bat, heard the gunshot ring out, heard Glinda’s scream, and then –

 


	2. Chapter 2

Elphaba was not the only one with ghosts – with those shadow-specters that haunt minds, rattling bone-cases with the stirring of blood.

Elphaba was not the only one who kept that rattling in check by force of will (a dubious thing, so fragile, “force,” how so?) – who stilled the trembling of her blood while it remained restless; who, gorgon-like, locked the shudders of her sinews and made them stone.

Glinda too made herself stone.

But she did not have the luxury of making her face a death-mask. Her face had to always be animated. In every moment, a crinkle of an eye, an artifice of merriment. Broad, flashing smiles snaking into closed, red-lipped smiles, slipping into smiles soft and understanding. Her expression unchanging (always a smile, relentless, grotesque, branded) and yet continually changing. Shifting from type to type with the ease of trying on a vibrant multitude of hats.

Feigning the ease was the trickiest task of all, but she did it. And, through her, it seemed effortless.

(She could not even take pride in her skill. Maybe that would have calmed her, if she could have smirked to herself after retreating from the horde, gloated before a mirror as Morrible might, but that was not in her nature.)

Nature?

Had she a nature?

Glinda debated this point with herself.

It weighed on her, the branded smile. (Smiles? All were the same, variations of the same paltry thing, but all unique, artfully crafted.) And, if it (they?) weighed on her, if there was some craft to it (them?), then that suggested performance.

Performers could depart the stage and so could she.

At night, in bed, she was with herself and not the people.

There, the performance ended, the cultivated persona fell away…

To reveal… what?

That is what scared her in the night.

Was she a void?

No, that could not be, for she felt love for the people – a love that went beyond the insincerity of the script she knew so well, a love that defied that script when she felt she had the power – and she felt… guilt…

There was humanity in her still.

Her very dread at that void, that lack, _proved_ there was humanity in her still. Didn’t it?

Then why did she feel like, when she stripped away the performance, she was stripping her own skin away?

She _wished_ she could strip her skin away, strip away the meat and bone, annihilate herself.

It was no more than she deserved.

(She was not like Morrible, not like the Wizard’s other toadies, she actually cared.)

(But what if she just told herself that to live with herself?)

(What if her self-deception made her the worst of the lot?)

(What self-deception? Was she not more honest than…? That was the trap, the false comfort, the thing that made the bad sleep well. Glinda recoiled from that.)

She could not allow herself to sleep well… and so she did not sleep…

(If she did not sleep, did that not reveal a break from the performance, a battle against it? Or was that yet another lie she told to live?)

( _This_ was living?)

Bone-cases were fragile things, however, that could only withstand so much, and Glinda could not help but succumb to sleep at times.

And when she did, she dreamt of green.

Not the hard green of the Emerald City.

But the soft green of long ago…

Warm skin green as a meadow, a green lusher than emeralds, pressed against her own rosy skin…

In dreams, she did not call her body a bone-casing. In dreams, she let her body simply be a body and feel as bodies feel…

When she awoke, her skin was clammy like a fish in an underground cavern.

She choked, remembering the dreams.

She did not deserve them.

They were only phantoms of things she would never have again and still she did not deserve them.

How dare her mind give them to her, these ghosts of pleasure?

A husk like her deserved no pleasure.

She deserved the lavish pomp that always accompanied her. How fitting, that was, for a shell!

How dare her mind tell her, “You deserve goodness after so much pain?”

She? Deserve goodness? She, who perverted Goodness down to the very word for the Wizard’s purposes?

She choked on the dreams like bits of bone in her throat and, in the end, used them as another scourge to flay her bleeding back.

_Let it end_ , she thought day by day. _Let it end_.

She screamed when the shot rang out.

Of course she did.

Pure instinct prompted it, the simple shock.

Yet, when the gunfire blazed through the night, she raised her eyes to meet it.

_Please…_

The thought flickered through her mind.

_Please let this be the end._

She did not have the time to process anything, to question what it was like to die like this, to wonder whether she was simply playing her role to the hilt, presenting herself as a perfect picture, perfect martyr, letting herself be pulled by the strings even here, even now, or whether she now had the mastery. She hardly cared.

She only wanted one thing.

And she did not get it.

Something slammed into her. She fell to the ground, a black cloak surrounding her. Her blood was pumping, hot and burning. The clarity of that last moment was gone as it had come. She disentangled herself from the dark shape, mind whistling, hissing like a firework before explosion, taking in the blood upon her blackened knuckles pressed against the cobblestone.

Glinda’s eyes reeled. Pandemonium was all about her. Men, women, children fleeing. Screaming. More shots crackling in the air. She, who had longed for death but a moment ago, now struggled to rise to her feet, to prevent herself from being trampled underfoot.

The mob was wild.

Her mind suddenly registered that the _something_ that had knocked her to the ground was _someone_. Her head swiveled, trying to find them.

_Not a bodyguard… Some overzealous citizen devoted to the image of her, to the ideal she presented?_

That stung.

_Please don’t be dead. Not because of me. It would be a pitiful thing, to die for me._

A black-gloved hand took hers, pulling her through the riotous crowd – a cowled figure, hooded, shadowed –

“This way!”

The voice was no less harsh than the other screams around her.

More shots echoed in Glinda’s ears as they zigzagged through the teeming swarm of humanity. The cowled figure pulled her on. Were bodies falling behind her? Was there a mother slumped in the street as her child sobbed, pulled away from the bleeding body by the shifting sea of people? Had the Gale Force come to restore order? Were they firing aimlessly, not caring how many civilians they struck?

Where was she going? She tried to pull away, but the gloved hand clamped hers so tightly.

“Let go of me!”

If the cowled figure acquiesced, where then would Glinda run? Back to the chaos? She did not know.

“I can’t!”

There was a strangled sob in the voice that had seemed so harsh moments before. Its firmness was made brittle, desperate, the farther away from the anarchy they ran…

And in that brittle desperation, the figure let slip their hood for just an instant, and Glinda caught a glimpse of emerald skin and flowing raven hair.


	3. Chapter 3

The figure – the woman – pulled up her hood again, but it was too late. Glinda had seen.

_“Elphie?”_

The name was a strange wine for Glinda’s tongue to taste. It was a honeyed vintage, a sweet nectar squeezed in distant days. It brought those days back to her, the hubbub of her time at Shiz… the labor of it… the innocence also… those days when she was _living_ still… At the same time, it was a bitter drink, but she did not know if the bitterness came from the thought of Elphaba or the thought of herself.

The word ‘ _Elphie_ ’ had been so many things to her (a name of friendship, of something deeper, a plea, an entreaty, a curse, a lamentation, an act of defiance when she was alone, an accusation to use against herself, a sacred intonation) that she did not know which one it was now.

The woman before her was clinging to her black cloak, as though that could shroud herself further. She was trying to curl back into the shadows, head bowed. They were in a narrow alley now, a dingy place, away from the flash of gunfire but close enough to hear it. It was as if Elphaba was trying to blend into the gloom of the slum despite being right in front of Glinda.

It might have been comical in its pitifulness were it not for the circumstances.

Elphaba found great interest in her shoes, feeling more the gangly schoolgirl than she ever had before. It was all so ridiculous. The barbs of the world, she had steeled herself against, yet there was that _word_ – insubstantial as a glistening bubble drifting over Munchkinland – and she was another’s image of her. Another’s image… and her own, an image she did not find wholly displeasing… but…

“We must… keep going,” she muttered, but that word, that name, had generated a stillness in the air, in their limbs, in everything. The stillness of quiet nights at Shiz when Elphaba had burned the midnight oil and, as sleepiness settled over her, felt Glinda gently wrapping a blanket around her, found their way here. The stillness of a moment before Glinda entered an exam and Elphaba squeezed her hand in encouragement. That stillness of uncertainty, but hope as well, back when hope remained untainted. Uncertainty…

The stillness of departures.

Glinda’s face had been so easy to read before the crowd. Welcoming, benign, insufferably saccharine. Something in its simplicity had drawn from Elphaba a dazzling conception of her, a remembrance made more luminous by the passing of time. She had been the beacon in the night of confusion. Now she was… well, she simply _was_. The benign easiness was gone. A part of Elphaba was glad of that. It meant the Glinda she knew still lived. She could see her amid the weariness. At the same time, it frightened her, for without easiness there came its opposite…

Elphaba was nakedly aware of how easy to read her own face must be. She did not want to think about how the sob she had swallowed contorted her face, shattering the death-mask stoicism she had perfected in the Resistance, leaving the mask’s shards to gleam like broken glass.

She had images in her mind of broken glass – not _memories_ , her mind had been too young for memories in babyhood, but the image of glass glinting like diamonds, maybe the ruination of one of the glassblower’s works, Turtle Heart, imprinted into her mind. Glinting. Drawing attention to its own fragility, its own destruction. Self-destruction. Shining.

Had she cut herself on the splintered thing of glass then? Perhaps she had, but knew blood soaking her fingers from the work of her own teeth, and so the pain faded or blurred together with the other pain until at last it was lost. One grows used to pain when one experiences it often… or one thinks one does. She thought she knew how to withstand pain (or restrain it, not quite the same thing) and now here she was, more vulnerable than in childhood. She had been a somber child… (but was somberness invulnerability even then?)

Glinda’s eyes were burning blue. She saw them taking in her countenance, her garb, settling upon the hand that clutched the gun.

Then she heard the, “Ahhhh…” of understanding like a death rattle, saw the faintest smile play upon Glinda’s lips.

Elphaba had prepared herself for a scream, for the mist of tears in Glinda’s eyes, for a look of distorted shock and betrayal. She had prepared herself for Glinda’s hatred. But that smile _broke_ her.

And the words that came after:

“Oh, Elphie, it would have been so much simpler if you had just taken the shot. Why didn’t you?”

_Why didn’t you?_

_It would have been the sweetest gift you ever gave me._

Now she laughed. Like Elphaba, Glinda had a savor of the ridiculousness of the world.

Elphaba, the eternally outspoken, was speechless.

“There were others,” Glinda said, almost idly. “Back there, there were others. Your… associates?”

“Yes.”

“And is that them I hear now? Or the Gale Force?”

“I don’t know. Both, probably.”

Glinda laughed again, a more anxious, reckless laugh this time.

“You saved the Good Witch of the North. If we get you out of those clothes and go back to the square, you’ll be a national hero.”

She was baiting Elphaba, trying to provoke a scorching glance or fierce retort, trying to make things as they used to be.

She wanted Elphaba to declare that she would not go back to lick the Wizard’s boots, to be his pre-packaged heroine on parade.

Glinda would find assurance in that, comfort in that – in the promise that an unbroken spirit of goodness, true to her convictions, so different than the mockery _she_ was, still existed in the world.

But all Elphaba did was gaze at her with eyes soft and tender – no judgment in their depths, even though Glinda knew she deserved it, deserved condemnation.

Glinda sank to her knees, wishing she could melt away like brown sugar, free herself from this bone-case, slide into the sewer… But she did not dissolve, and Elphaba’s arms wrapped around her, and she buried her face into Elphaba’s breast, her tear-stained face, all the while murmuring “Elphie… Elphie… Elphie…”

And now she knew the name to be a sacred intonation – a prayer – the last thing she had to keep her whole.


	4. Chapter 4

“I won’t leave you.”

They clung together the way moss clings to a great tree – the way vines cling to its trunk, weathered by the ages, winding and tapering – and those words were like the rustling of the wind in the great tree’s branches, the rain-drenched wind, still trembling with a storm’s tumult, as if the air itself is unsure if the time for earth-shaking gales has passed or only begun.

Elphaba could have spoken those words and meant them, but it was not she who spoke. It was Glinda.

Her voice trembled like the air anticipating the blast of the other elements, but in that anticipation, there was strength. _Glinda had always been strong_ , Elphaba thought, breaking the embrace asunder and searching her face – finding that familiar courage transformed but twinkling there, _strong in ways she hardly realized._

Sense told Elphaba that they could not go together.

“I do not, to be frank, expect to live out the month,” she whispered, “and I will not have you dying beside me.”

“I wouldn’t mind dying,” mused Glinda, that ghoulish smile returning to her face. She must have felt Elphaba’s spasm at that, for the smile dripped off her face like ghost-white wax and she said seriously, “Oh, I don’t mean it like _that_. I don’t intend to chase after death if I can help it, but if I am to die, I’d rather it be with you.”

“You did not ‘chase after’ death tonight,” replied Elphaba, her voice terse with disquiet, “but still you did not fly from it when it came in the form of a bullet. I do not… I do not…” – Elphaba swallowed back a sob for the umpteenth time that night – “I do not want to be your roundabout form of suicide. Please don’t ask that of me. _Please_.”

Glinda shut her eyes and let the tears run freely down her cheeks, a kind of worn-down peace overtaking her. Elphaba remained perturbed, unsure if this was the peace of self-destruction consuming Glinda, the dark fancy of annihilation. Finally, Glinda’s eyes fluttered open, washed clear of tears, and she raised a hand to caress Elphaba’s cheek.

“Oh, Elphie, you do not mean death to me. You mean _life_.”

“And am I your only tether to life?” Elphaba asked, terrified of the answer.

Glinda reflected. She thought of the urchins who approached her in the street, dark-eyed children with mud-stained faces. Sometimes, she smuggled meat and drink to them from the finest tables, hoping to undo the ravages the world did unto them. She thought of the miners in the blackness of the earth, many younger than the beggars in the street, but with the bodies of the old – backs hooped with the weight of their accoutrements, faces pinched and gaunt. They were seldom let above ground, lest Oz think too deeply where the emeralds of the dazzling capital came from, but every so often a smarmy businessman would dredge them up for his own publicity – and that is when Glinda saw them. They, who lived like moles or pale worms in darkness, always were in awe of her; and although she knew herself to be no more than a painted clown, still she rejoiced that her parlor tricks could give them hope. (It weighed on her – for what was she really but a pacifier, keeping the labor force in check?) But if she gave them light in their brief respites from the abyss…  She thought of the Animals she could not save, but whose sufferings she tried to ease in unassuming ways – soft spells to soothe their pain, to let them pass away before they faced the Wizard’s tortures.

Were these the whispers of a collaborator’s heart? Was this the balm to soothe complicity? Glinda had been so certain, but now in Elphaba’s presence, she seemed to be seeing through different eyes.

(In Elphaba’s presence…)

But the want was within her already, the want to do good. The want to rip apart the “g” and send each “o” spinning and bend the “d” like wire until the painted word of “Good” (that flimsy device she now represented, that weapon of the Wizard’s) was gone and in its place was the Thing Itself.

“No,” Glinda said at last. “No, not you only. I want to live for my own sake, for myself. Not for you, but _with_ you. But…” (She faltered, the curve of the Wizard’s “g” about her throat like a hook, each “o” a hoop of iron binding her, and the “d” a blunt cudgel to her legs.) “But… for the longest time I haven’t been really living. I’ve been like a tiktok man –” (Here she shivered.) “Less than a tiktok man for they have no consciences and I – Wind me up and I go through the motions of life – I do not live –  except that I am alive – and when these automaton eyes of mine look on horror, they cannot gaze on blankly like tiktok eyes, they cannot bear to – but they have looked on… things – and I should have done more – I want to do more – and now you’re here and I see the chance to smash the mechanism – but I should have done more – I should have – ”

_“Elphie, get in this cab, don’t be a fool!”_

“I should have sprung down from the cab that day in the Emerald City. I should have run after you. Even if I ended up losing you in the sea of faces. I should have gone after you. I should have held out. I should have done… anything… but give in to despair.”

Glinda saw blood trickling upon Elphaba’s face and realized teardrops were carving burning scars below her eyelids. It was the first time she had truly seen her weep.

As for Elphaba, Glinda’s final words had moved her to these tears that now scalded her flesh. “Glinda,” she breathed, feeling another sob coursing through her and knowing the searing pain would sting again, “Glinda, I’m sorry. Glinda, it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should never have left you. I didn’t know what I was doing, what path I planned to take. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I did, and I’m sorry. Glinda, please – Please don’t hate yourself. Hate me, but not yourself.”

“I did hate you for a time,” Glinda sighed, “but I loved you too deeply for that to last. I admired you even as I cursed you. Besides, I grew to hate myself more as time went on.”

_“Don’t.”_

Elphaba winced at her own commanding tone. She did not want to sound cold, but at the same time, she refused to hear Glinda degrade herself.

She mellowed her voice. “Did you mean what you said, about… about wanting to live _with_ me?”

“I did,” Glinda said simply, her eyes like starlight. She was still profoundly moved by Elphie’s weeping, moved and devastated. Elphaba had not wept when she turned her back upon the cab all those years ago. Their last kiss and Elphaba’s parting words lingered most in Glinda’s mind, but her masking of her tearless face reared up in Glinda’s memories on those desolate nights when the word “Elphie” became a lamentation and a curse. Seeing Elphaba weep, the shadow of bitterness became as insubstantial as Glinda’s own title. It evaporated and Elphaba became, not a specter of desertion or idol to revere, but human as she once was – beautifully human in a way that Glinda had thought she had lost the chance to see forever.

“You’ll be missed,” Elphaba said bluntly. “A fine, upstanding public figure like you. The people will wonder where you went, there’ll be an outcry. The Wizard and Morrible will hunt you down and they won’t be pleased by your dereliction.”

“Let them hunt,” scoffed Glinda. “I don’t doubt they’re growing tired of me and my moral indecision anyways. I’ve not done anything to particularly draw their ire, but I occasionally get the sense Morrible harbors doubts about my loyalty. If I stay too much longer with them, I’ll probably end up in Southstairs.”

Something pained Elphaba about the flippant way Glinda still treated concepts like her own possible incarceration and torture, but she did not want to nag Glinda about it when she was in an already fragile state.

So Elphaba simply smiled and said, “Ah, but Glinda, you’re too popular among the populace!”

The feeble attempt at alliteration was as meager as forms of humor come, but Elphie’s bemused inflection of the word “popular” made Glinda giggle and for a moment, in spite of everything, it was like they were back at Shiz, the both of them bouncy and bright.

But they were not at Shiz.

The alley had remained a world unto itself, a world as silent as the desolation of the moon. They had been able to talk unhindered as the chaos in the square echoed on at a distance. As they had spoken, the sound of the chaos died down – a fairly clear sign that the Gale Force had routed… well, anyone they chose to identify as a conspirator.

Now, a steady scratching sound disturbed their solitude. Instinctively, Elphaba nudged Glinda behind her, deeper into the shadows. This was perhaps not the wisest decision, for had it been a member of the Gale Force approaching, the presence of Glinda the Good would have more easily diffused the situation. Still, Elphaba’s instinct of protection was too great and, as fate would have it, the figure dragging themselves through the murky night was attired much like her.

The Resistance fighter was bleeding and, like Elphaba, still clinging to their weapon. They covered their face with makeshift bandages so they looked something like a disinterred mummy, but Elphaba could see the wild panic in the slits of their eyes.

Tentatively, she stepped out of the shadows.

The Resistance member jolted like a cornered thing, raising their gun. When they saw Elphaba, clad as she was, they calmed slightly, but Elphaba could still hear their tense and ragged breathing.

“It’s madness back there,” the fighter breathed, his voice muffled but high and reedy. “The first of us must have panicked, I don’t know. Others fired; I don’t know who was hit. I think the Wizard’s forces must have spirited away the Witch. What position were you in? Did you see anything?”

While speaking, the Resistance member had been tending to the gash in his side, hunched over and hand clamped upon it to staunch the blood. He had taken only a cursory glance at the figure coming out of the darkness, returning to his wound once he sized her up as a friend. With the bleeding now more under control, he regained a firm grip on his gun and raised his eyes a second time. As he grew more accustomed to the dismal surroundings, and more at ease in the presence of a companion, he perceived Glinda in the gloom, pale as a marble statue.

The eyes within the slits clouded with confusion and then with anger. “What the…”

The Resistance member fired immediately, without hesitation, but was still disoriented. Glinda dove downwards and Elphaba struck her former colleague with her gun. He snarled, doubtless more in a haze, and Elphaba knocked the weapon from his hands. Still he did not relent, lunging forward despite his own helplessness, a kind of fervor driving him on, clawing, scrabbling.

The two fighters struggled together, Elphaba doing all she could to _keep him away from Glinda._ His breath was hot against her face, wafting from between the rags he wore. She felt his blood leaking onto her. He had cast aside the wound, was bleeding freely now, but did not seem to care. Indeed, his gaping wound simply seemed to spur him in his conviction. The blood poured from him, making Elphaba feel she was in combat with a ghoul, with something already dead beneath those bandages.

In his mind, he _was_ already dead. He knew it. He was simply trying to make the best of his last moments, and relishing the fearsome effect his bloody ghastliness gave him.

Elphaba scratched at his eyes with her long fingers, at the only part of him that felt real and not a living nightmare, tearing away some of the bandages to reveal a wan face. A boy’s face. A face to match that reedy voice.

A new recruit, a young recruit. How long had he been a part of them?

Life was sapping from the boy’s body and she finally managed to pin him down. He was losing the strength to rise anyway.

“He’s just a child… We can still save him…” Glinda whispered, and, in spite of herself, she moved forward, ready to cast a healing spell, but the boy recoiled.

“Don’t touch me!” he cried, seeming shrunken and small and every bit the boy that he was, but with the faux imperiousness of one who wants to live up to the vague and absurd notion of ‘dying well.’ “I won’t be healed just so you can torture me later!”

A macabre serenity settled over him as he lay in the gutter almost languidly. He was very nearly lounging now, bleeding out onto the stones.

The boy’s brilliant eyes, his most vivid aspect, followed Elphaba as she rose, as Glinda wrapped an arm over her shoulder.

“You… fucking… set us up… didn’t you?” he murmured. “How long have you been passing information to them?”

“I didn’t. And I haven’t,” Elphaba answered, but the boy’s head had already fallen backward, his vacant eyes turned to the sky.

The alley was silent again.

Elphaba could not take her eyes away from the pale corpse, even with Glinda tugging her and whispering, “Elphie, please, we’ve got to go. Please, Elphie.”

At last, Elphaba clasped Glinda’s hand and the two of them vanished into the night.


	5. Chapter 5

For a time, Elphaba seemed as lifeless as the corpse they left behind in the street – a weight that Glinda almost had to drag. They were soon away from that place of death, but Glinda knew that Elphaba’s mind lingered there. So, she considered her options. She was Glinda the Good, after all. She could go to her private rooms and find Elphaba and herself a change of clothes. Nothing she owned, however, was particularly conducive to anonymity. Besides, she ran the risk of being accosted there by someone with connections to the Wizard. Someone who would surely remark if they saw her in the company of a bloodied Resistance fighter. She would have to make Elphaba wait for her, and Glinda did not want to be parted from her for too long or for the distance between them to be so wide.

“Elphie,” she hissed, “where do you live? You’re covered in blood, we have to get you out of –”

“No.” Some of the shock was beginning to wear away from Elphaba. “We can’t go there. Not many of my old comrades knew where I stayed, but a few did. And if any of those few were in a position tonight where they could see me save you… they’ll be there.”

Glinda thought of the shops throughout the city – not the opulent ones that the press so often photographed her in front of, the ones she was so often told to publicize – but the smaller ones. The forgotten businesses of the poor. Those storefronts as rundown as shanties, eyesores that the Wizard wanted swept away. Glinda kept note of them; someone in a position of power had to…

The Emerald City took on a haunting sheen at night, gleaming like the scales of a great dragon coiled over its hoard, its domes and spires the crests and ridges upon a mottled hide. Smokestacks belched the fumes of its nostrils and every light from every streetlamp and window was the fire pulsing within the beast, rippling beneath its belly, running through its veins. Glinda put little stock in the lore of the Time Dragon, but if any night could inspire superstition in her and a sense of forbidding dread, it was this night.

One light glowed dimmer than the rest and that put Glinda’s mind at ease. She had found a place where the heat inside the serpent cooled: a little, out-of-the-way knick-knack shop. She saw old coats and robes hanging in the window – plain brown and black, inconspicuous. They would do.

“Wait across the way,” she whispered to Elphaba. Then she squeezed her hand. Elphaba had saved her. Now, she could do her part to save Elphaba. They would only be separated by a few feet, she told herself, and she could see Elphaba in the distance from the window.

Glinda entered into a small, cramped space. On all sides, the walls were covered in shelves crammed with bric-a-bracs – dusty ornaments, broken baubles, homey signs that reeked of age and insincerity. A prominently displayed bottle up front claimed to hold three hairs from a Woozy’s tail, though what precisely a Woozy was, the greasy label did not say. Other vials of various colored liquids gathered dust upon the shelves, scattered amongst odd trinkets and tidbits like the left wing of a yellow butterfly and a six-leafed clover. Chipped china dolls gazed down at Glinda from the uppermost shelf of the wall facing her. She was thankful they left her field of vision as she approached the proprietor of the establishment, for she feared they may have once been living. (Glinda had always smiled at childhood tales of the Dainty China Country, but tonight was not the night for smiling.) Hanging among the robes was a grotesque marionette with swollen feet and hands – and a bulbous head maned by wild hair and a flowing beard like a warrior-chieftain or an old sea-god.

The woman at the counter was short and stocky, with patchy grey hair and a face the hue of a pink, sugary sweet. She had her back to the door when Glinda first entered, puttering about and dusting her collection of oddities, humming an upbeat song to herself. Every so often, the woman would sing snatches of the lyrics under her breath, almost unconsciously. Glinda recognized the song as something that the Wizard had introduced to the people to keep their minds off the harshness of their lot, and felt torn at hearing it so blithely burbled now.

_“…And a couple of tra la las… That’s how we pass the day away in the merry old land of…_ Just a minute!” the old woman sang out. Finally, she turned around. “Oh, my stars!”

Awestruck perspiration dripped from the old woman’s brow, giving her sweet-pink face a syrupy shimmer in the sallow light. She very nearly dropped the feather duster in her hands, making Glinda’s heart jump into her mouth out of fear of the clatter.

“Oh, gracious me!” the old woman muttered. “My goodness!” I, um, I mean, Your Goodness! Or… Your Goodliness!  Oh, dear me… In my shop too…”

Glinda did her best to slide into the artifice she had perfected. “Yes, it is I!” she drawled airily. “Rejoicify!”

(How vain that sounded… and how clumsy the rhyme was!)

(This should have been second nature to her… but this night… this night…)

“Well, I knew you’d be roundabout these parts, to be sure, but I never imagined you’d honor my humble little – What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“These, please,” said Glinda briskly, pulling down two sizeable robes of faded brown and smiling like one of those dolls on display – with their painted, frozen faces.

“Awful threadbare for you, ain’t they, ma’am?”

“They’re as splendabulous as any swankified gown, I assure you!” said Glinda, still sugar-smiling.

A frown creased the old woman’s pouchy face. “Is everything alright there, ma’am? Say, who’s that now?”

She was looking beyond Glinda, looking past the window. Glinda did not dare turn her head, lest her gaze focus the old woman’s eyes on the shape of Elphie in the darkness.

“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m sure!” Glinda declared – a little too hastily. “My bodyguard –”

“That must be it, sure…” muttered the old woman. “Doesn’t look like no bodyguard, though, ma’am, and you’ve got to be careful on nights like these. You especially, ma’am. There’s talk of ins’rrectionists about.”

“It’s nothing,” Glinda repeated.

(Her voice, was it trembling?)

(Did the woman hear it?)

Glinda smiled again, but feared that she smiled too much.

(She had always smiled too much.)

(Why should this moment stand out? Why should it be any different?)

(This moment.)

(When it truly mattered.)

“Your hands, ma’am!” the old woman cried suddenly, and Glinda buried them beneath the folds of the two cloaks, hiding the tarn of the street, the scrapes on her knuckles.

But the old woman watched keenly after giving Glinda a bag, watched the fabric slide from her hands and then watched her drop her lands limply on the other side of the counter.

Glinda felt her eyes.

(Tonight was not the night for smiling, but smile, she had to.)

“Blink, ma’am,” the old woman whispered.

“What’s that?” Glinda murmured, feigning carelessness.

“Blink three times if you’re in danger. Is it _that one_ out there?”

The old woman did not gesture. Indeed, her face became as genial as Glinda’s was. But her treacly eyes shone with anxiousness.

(What strange mirrors of each other they were now…)

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Glinda answered – but a crack ran through her voice, a crack as pronounced as any on the porcelain dolls above.

The old woman reached out. Her fingers were stubby, her hands as rough as soap. She took Glinda’s hand in hers and read each mark and cut upon it like tea leaves. Glinda could have pulled away, but the gentleness of the woman’s touch paralyzed her more than anything else.

“To anyone looking in, I’m just bedazzled by Glinda the Good, ma’am, like anyone would be,” the old women breathed, still smiling that smile that did not extend to her eyes. “I’m sure there’s much layin’ on of hands wherever you’re around; yer an icon. But tell me, is _that one_ the only one out there? Or is there a whole pack of ’em? Are you being held captive, ma’am?”

 “You don’t understand,” Glinda whispered, her voice deathly serious. A part of her wanted to tell the woman everything, but she could not. As kindhearted as she seemed, still she was a stranger.

“Oh, I understand well enough,” the old woman mused. “Always, the killing. In the reign of the Ozmas, they kept their enemies in line through blood and there was backstabbing and court intrigue. Then the Wizard came and it’d all be different, they said, but blood, blood… Blood on all sides, no matter the faction! I’ve seen many in my time come and go, and few had good hearts, but you do. It’d be a pity, ma’am, to lose you. Now, I may not know much, but one thing I do know is that shadow out there means you no good.”

_You’re wrong_ , Glinda thought, and her eyes passed over to the window where she saw Elphie waiting, a great rush of warmth filling her heart.

Then she turned her eyes back to the old woman and her voice was clear – fearful still, but clear:

“Please. Tell no one I’ve been here.”

The silence that followed hung like the weight of shackles about Glinda’s neck.

“I… I understand, ma’am.”

_Do you?_

_What do you understand?_

_Do you think I want you to tell?_

_Because of the pain in my eyes?_

“Please,” Glinda said again.

That “please” was a prayer that the shopkeeper meant well, a prayer that she was only misguided. Glinda knew that there were many old souls tired of the turning of Fortune’s wheel – but she also knew that the Wizard had many spies among the common folk, and these spies wheedled out the treacherous by speaking words of exhaustion or malcontent. Glinda thought of Morrible too and her delight at perverse contrivances. Glinda wouldn’t have put it past Morrible to enchant a crusting piece of candy and transform it into a thing of human-shape. It would also suit Morrible’s fancy to place the lifeless, living husk among other humanoid things – dolls, puppets, and the like. Oh, Morrible would gain great amusement at that! But that was the paranoia talking… But even if the old woman was not a spy, not a creation, even if her motives were pure – what of that? That was no guarantee of her silence. And so, that “please” was also an attempt to reach out and touch the old woman the same way she had touched Glinda – with gentleness.

The old woman’s smile had fallen away, leaving her face unreadable.

Glinda finally turned and walked out, grateful to escape the warmth of the dragon’s breath. She felt Elphie’s hand in hers, gentle as the old woman’s but in a different way… gentle in a way that provided solace, security… peace…

“What took so long?”

“I either bought us a little more time or I brought on our pursuit more quickly.”

Elphaba nodded. There was no inscrutable quality in her face, not like the old woman’s. When Elphie understood, she _understood_.

They had to move.


	6. Chapter 6

They had to get out.

The dragon’s coils were labyrinthine and studded with jewels – so that one did not know the worm from its own treasure-mound.

Those towers of emerald, were they riches heaped to mountain-height or were they the horns of a grizzled head protruding, hung with trinkets and precious gems?

Jewels are priceless. A handful in a beggar’s hand can mean life in the face of death.

_They_ were beggars now.

But should a beggar’s hand dig too deep within the treasure – should it touch not jewels but the dragon’s jewel-encrusted hide, then the beggar’s bones become more baubles for the serpent, bleaching white as sculpted ivory or strands of pearls.

How could one distinguish the creature from its hoard?

They had to get out.

The dragon’s coils, choking-thick, were closing tighter.

By daybreak, there would be checkpoints at every corner, soldiers lining the streets.

The beast would not slumber in daylight.

Its wings would roar.

_They had to get out._

Glinda saw a cab on the side of the road. Its driver was on the ground, tending to his horse – a bony thing he had painted an unnatural gold – perhaps there was some trick in the paint that made it take on a different hue depending on the light, for as Glinda approached, the animal now seemed sea-blue. _A decent enough diversion for tourists_ , she supposed. The cabby himself was a portly man in a bright green coat and top hat with a waxed mustache and a beard as ruddy as his face. In fact, his bushy beard was such a neon orange that it must have been dyed. Like the coloring of his horse, like his outfit, like even the rosiness in his cheeks, it was garish and artificial. His cheeks were pancaked with red and, had it been possible, Glinda would have accused him of dyeing the periwinkle in his eyes.

There was much of the Emerald City façade about him, but he seemed not to give a damn about upholding it. His blue eyes drooped instead of danced, his cherry nose moldered. That drew Glinda to him, for she knew too well what it was to be exhausted by artifice, to not give a damn anymore – and in a city where performance was everything, there was some comfort in one that performed carelessly. Moreover, he showed affection to his horse – Glinda counted that in his favor too – but that affection apparently did not extend to those around him. 

 “Away with you! I’ll have no waifs here!” he barked. “Away!”

“Please, sir!” Glinda implored. “My… friend… and I have to get out of the city! I have money!” She produced an ample amount and held it before him.

“And where’d you get that, then, My Lady in Rags?” he grunted. He gave the money a skeptical glance, but refused to look up at either Glinda or Elphaba. Perhaps that was for the best. “No, thank you! I’m not taking anyone in my cab tonight. There was an attack in the square half an hour ago. I’ve no idea who could be skulking about after that and I have no wish to get a better idea. I’m not getting involved. With anyone. I’ve got myself and Sylvester to look out for!”

He shoved her aside so that she almost fell to the ground. Elphaba caught her. Then he marched past, drawing a lump of sugar from his pocket for his horse.

Glinda felt the splash of gutter water, the acidic spittle of the serpent. She felt no bitterness, no spite – only helplessness, and helplessness births desperation. For a split second, she locked eyes with Elphaba, whose eyes were clouded and dark. Then her eyes drifted back to the cabby. He was a few feet off now, in conversation with a knot of burly men that had poured forth from a nearby tavern.

She understood his instinct of self-preservation.

She felt it too.

In that moment, she sprang into the carriage, pulling Elphie after her.

She hardly realized Elphie’s reluctance, hardly knew where she got the strength to tug her in.

Years of immobility pushed her forward. Another life pushed her forward, a life she wanted to burn and purge away…

Her life _would_ burn away.

Skin curling, blackened, dropping from her frame.

A sheet of flame from the dragon’s jaws engulfing her, razing her…

And Elphaba? Oh, Elphaba…

On the floor of the carriage, Glinda felt Elphaba’s body against hers, felt her breath against her face. They were so close, Glinda could have nestled the bridge of her nose against Elphaba’s own; so close, she could see more clearly the tempest-born darkness in Elphaba’s eyes… Their heads sank down, their spines bent like two maunts in meditation – enclosed in a cell whose only light filtered down from a barred window above. The veil of the curtain at the carriage window was their bars. Glinda thought of manuscripts left behind by maunts of old – how sometimes, preserved in crumbling pages, were words of love – flower-petals of beauty unfurling in inscribed words like stained glass… They could be bowdlerized by copying or by the interpretation of time (“Do not,” she remembered a nasal-voiced professor at Shiz once declaring, “presume a baseness to the bonds between these two women of yore. Theirs was a profoundly spiritual union…” Elphaba had begged to differ, but only in private.) but still the light of their love shone through like sunlight through a rose window. Glinda thought of the bleeding together of love and spiritual transcendence, thought of those two maunts in their cell, hearts entwining like the vines upon the mauntery wall, like the vines growing over their modest graves in the little cemetery there (cell, wall, cemetery… all cold, cold stone… death-grip on hearts in love… death…) Death.

 “Well, I’m heading back early tonight, lads!” The cabby’s voice shattered every image in Glinda’s mind’s eye, like stained glass splintering, sparkling and solemn saints falling to pieces, so that there was nothing inside her but itself. “Tonight’s a bad night to be about in!”

Her eyes darted upward to the slit above their heads, still hunched upon the floor, neck crooked. A shadow passed over, the shadow of the cab-driver’s bulk.

He had paused before the door.

His hands were heavy.

_Were they going to reach out, pull it open?_

_Did he suspect?_

_Or was he simply looking for where the two ragamuffins had run off to?_

Maunts kept mantras and sacred intonations on their lips, and in this moment, Glinda’s had one of her own: _Please don’t open the door, please don’t open the door, please…_

She heard a sniff, then saw his body vanish from the window-slit.

There was a sudden creak and the cab lurched forward.

He had stepped up to his seat.

Curled up into a ball. Teeth gritted tightly. Glinda made no sound at the crack of the whip.

They were on the move.

The cab had gone a long way before Glinda even thought of rising, before she even thought of breathing. She must have been breathing, but she did not feel it. She felt every rattle, every shake, every jolt – and she felt Elphaba’s warmth against her, felt Elphaba’s hand squeezing her own. Even as she pulled herself out of the tangle of jagged angles in the darkness, she felt that. Elphaba would not relinquish her hand – even when they both took their seats – clinging as children cling to hands they trust…

Glinda thought of the tempest in Elphaba’s eyes and suddenly despised herself. How unbearably selfish she was! All this time, thinking of “we two” as a vague abstraction, as something for herself. She had meant it for the both of them, of course, every step she had taken and choice she had made had been for the both of them – but the “self” in “self-preservation” was a subtle and insidious thing. She had hardly spoken with Elphaba since the alley (blood dripped horribly behind her eyelids), hurtling onward through zigzag paths, mind consumed by a phantasmagorical beast bred of paranoia and panic.

She wanted to speak with Elphie now. She wanted to talk with her about the trauma she had experienced. Freely. Openly. Honestly. Elphie _needed_ that. Elphie had wrestled a child to the ground and watched him bleed to death, refusing help. If the blood was still lurid for Glinda, she could not imagine what it must be like for Elphie…

(She had left Elphie alone in the street… alone with her thoughts… after _that_.)

She longed to tell Elphie that the boy’s death was not her fault, that none of this was her fault. She wanted to talk with Elphaba about Elphaba, to do this for her and with her – but they had a listener now. Speak too freely and he would hear.

So, all Glinda could do was clutch Elphie’s hand and once, just once in the stillness, whisper, “I love you.”

Like one of those maunts whose whisper of love dissolved into the stillness of the stones encompassing them… Only the tomb-white walls could hear it, it was spoken so softly, but still it was real.

Glinda hoped her “I love you” would linger like traces in an illuminated manuscript… but “I love you” was so simple a phrase, cheapened by careless use… Maybe that left it as substanceless as the apples in their cabby’s cheeks… but it was all she could say.

“I killed him,” was Elphaba’s only reply, confirming Glinda’s most pained suspicions, “as surely as if I shot him myself.”

 “No… no… no…”

(Did Glinda’s words melt into the air? Or was their rustle like the scribe’s pen upon parchment?)

They were driving past the place it happened now; that is what broke Elphaba’s silence. To anyone else, it was just a dead-end street among the green domes and turrets, but Elphaba knew, and she watched vacantly through the window as the carriage rollicked by.  Glinda watched her, and watched with her. An instant and they had passed, as though the death were meaningless.

Then the square appeared before them.

Glinda made to draw the curtain, but Elphaba pulled her back.

Blood.

Blood like the blood that had soaked Elphaba’s hands.

Soaking the streets.

Trickling into the cracks.

Innocent blood, some of it. Neither the blood of Resistance members nor of the Wizard’s men…

Blood of those caught in the crossfire.

Blood of those bludgeoned down when the Gale Force emerged to restore the peace.

Some still crumpled on the ground, brains spilling out like rubies…

No matter to the Gale Force, they could write them off as insurrectionists, after all.

No matter, no matter…

(No matter to anyone but their families… and to Elphaba, who looked out with masochistic intensity...)

(And to Glinda, who, once transfixed, could not look away… All those souls she had tried to protect and failed…)

Others being carried away in stretchers, their faces haggard and white…

_Did they know who shot them?_

_Did they realize, as they bled, that the bullet that tore through them could have been fired by the Gale Force and not the dread terrorists they feared?_

_Did they curse the Wizard as they became more fodder for his propaganda machine?_

_Or praise him? Knowing, surely, the forces of the Wonderful Wizard were too wonderful to make mistakes?_

_Or did they just… die in too much pain to care?_

Casualties of the preservation of peace…

All that mattered was that the square was cleared…

Bare as a skull…

Elphaba’s face contorted and Glinda wished more than anything that she could feel the relief of weeping without it causing her pain.

Glinda felt the grip on her hand release her and then Elphaba was crushed to her bosom and Glinda was whispering, “This isn’t your fault. This has nothing to do with you. I love you… I love you…” as softly as she could, speaking so small…

They passed on.

Glinda had expected soldiers, but she had not expected so many so soon – and she expected them to be more aimless, at least in the first hours. They were apt at aimlessness, after all – the clearing of the square proved that – and no less terrible in their aimlessness. But as they went on, she saw more and more of them.

And when the carriage came to a halt, she knew, but loathed the knowing.

_A checkpoint? In place already? But how could they –_

“What’s this, what’s this?” the cabby grumbled overhead.

The deep, clear voice of a constable or soldier responded, “We received word from an old woman that Glinda the Good may have been abducted by the terrorists that attacked tonight. The old lady sounded frightened and we can only pray that the fiends are not torturing her.”

Glinda felt a rock in the pit of her stomach.

_The shopkeeper had meant well, at least…_

_Good intentions, good intentions._

“Who have you got in there then?”

The cabby let out a snort from his burning coal of a nose. “Why, Glinda the Good, I’m sure!” he laughed.

The patrol laughed with him.

Glinda sucked in her breath, waiting.

Elphaba poised herself.

The soldiers flung open the door. Their leader gave a sudden shout, cracking the cabby over the head with violent force and sending him reeling. The two women lunged forward, everything was a blur, Glinda saw the cabby crawling on the ground, blood spewing like lava from the gash in his head – saw Elphaba standing over him, desperate to protect the few people she could – screaming – shock –


	7. Chapter 7

Elphaba did not know what to do.

Her gun had fallen away in darkness…

Her spidery hands, what could they do against truncheon, cudgel, and shot?

Yet, she kept both arms outstretched, one hand ahead of her to stave off the oncoming soldiers and shield the bleeding cabby, one behind her to guard Glinda.

How small and shriveled the cabby looked in his tatty green, crawling there on the ground, like a bloated frog about to be trampled by an ox or more like a tortoise with a broken shell… (Like a boy’s body shrunken in death, like a boy’s body as it lay bleeding…) His battered top hat lay in the muck, revealing the naked baldness at the heart of his scraggles of hair. The blood was founting from his pate. He had not even realized what was happening when the soldiers first struck him…

(Blood…)

In the Resistance, you were everything and nothing.

You were nothing because you had no identity. Perhaps you had a face, perhaps you had a name, but your face and name never led to anything beyond. At the same time, you were everything – because you were part of the cell and the cell was everything – and perhaps that was abstraction, but Elphaba knew when it was not – when an anonymous hand had taken hers and pulled her to safety, when she had done the same for others.

Protection of the individual – for the larger whole’s sake, yes, but also for the one. Preservation of the cluster.

She had… failed… to protect that boy.

(Would she fail to protect Glinda?)

Her cluster was scattered.

(She had scattered them…)

(Forsaken the whole for the sake of one, for Glinda’s sake…)

(Or had she forsaken the abstraction for something real?)

(Or both?)

(Or neither?)

She had a new cluster now. Here. In this moment. Herself. Glinda. This faceless man, this man she hardly knew but was one among many, part of the larger whole, part of the abstraction she refused to let be an abstraction…

She pulled him back by the scruff of his neck. Half-blind, face awash with blood, he let her. Crablike, he scuttled behind her legs. Did he retreat back into the darkness or slump there, too broken to drag himself farther, cowering? She did not know. She did not feel his weight against her, did not feel him clinging to her legs, but that could have been the focus of her mind hewing away all else. All she knew was that this wretched man would not be another white-faced boy, that Glinda would not be another boy with ashen face… All she knew was…  

She was the wall between her cluster and the end.

(She was the wall that would crumble at a few blows…)

But she would stand for as long as she had the power.

She had to.

Even if that was all she could do.

The soldiers descended upon her and she expected everything – anything. A hail of bullets. (They had killed so many this night for less – but Glinda was there – would they risk _her_ life to take down one terrorist?) The butt of a gun smashing her face and knocking her into unconsciousness. The irresistible force of the bludgeons. But as the soldiers swung, their staffs blossomed – green not like the City of Emeralds around them, but like things of the earth – and they hardly realized, continuing to swing as flowers drooped in their hands, swinging with fists in stupefaction.

One soldier raised his rifle and fired.

Bubbles drifted from the muzzle, bubbles as shimmery as children’s laughter.

And Elphaba heard Glinda’s voice behind her, clear and firm:

_“Don’t. Touch. Her.”_

And at the sound of that voice, Elphaba for the first time felt the security to look behind her. She saw the cabby a safe distance away, an imprint like a star upon his brow, no longer bleeding.

The kiss of a witch upon his brow…

The Witch of the North strode forward, hair like golden fire.

Let the dragon try to devour her. She would burn its burning throat…

Her eyes were like the circles of blue flame in which fairies danced in the ancient forest of Burzee, nude within the bounding icicle-light.

She pulled Elphaba to her bosom and Elphaba saw a bubble as pink as a poppy close around them both.

Eyes.

So many eyes upon them.

The eyes of the soldiers – bewildered, baffled, stunned.

The eyes of the cabby, round and reverent as he awkwardly shuffled back into the night.

The eyes of ordinary people – of an old woman in a kerchief holding her daughter, of a man in a drab suit, of so many of the common folk looking on in awe…

As the radiant sphere ascended like an early-rising sun and glided away.


	8. Chapter 8

Rose petals settled upon Elphaba’s eyes, gliding gently closer in the ebony as she regained consciousness, growing larger until her eyelids were overflowing with the crimson bloom.

She felt the warmth of the sun before she saw it.

When she opened her eyes, there was Glinda against an expanse of azure, the sunlight playing with her hair, toying with it twinklingly, making a halo around her of such brilliant gold it was almost a silvery-white. Elphaba had never seen the Nonestic Ocean, and had always scoffed at the sea tales of mermaids rescuing drowning sailors, but she thought of them now, thought of a mermaid upon the yellow sands, stroking a human face, smooth as coral that branches beneath the waters in a rainbow…

Glinda’s hands were gentler than any sea-maid’s. She felt them, warmer than the kiss of the sun, clasping her own.

Their hands were so settled together that Elphaba knew Glinda had been holding her hand all the while she had been sleeping.

Glinda had been watching over her.

“You’re awake!” Glinda cried softly, her eyes misting with joy.

“I am,” she echoed, smiling feebly.

Elphaba pushed herself gingerly up and took in her surroundings. Trees stood in the distance, their tawny leaves fanning in the sun. Before their majesty, a river ran. Its gentle surface reflected the shining leaves. On Glinda and Elphaba’s side of the river, golden grasses sloped down to meet the ribbon of blue. They were nestled on a hilltop in a forest clearing.

“Where are we exactly?” she finally asked.

“Away from the Emerald City,” was all Glinda replied, but it was enough.

Elphaba rose, staggering a moment from the tilt in the ground. A heaviness hung over her, a dull ache in her bones, but after all she had been through, she was surprised that was all she felt.

“Elphie, you mustn’t –”

“I’m fine,” Elphaba breathed. She wanted to convince herself of that as much as Glinda, but Glinda knew better – and _she_ knew better. So, she leaned against Glinda, let Glinda guard her steps.

“No, you’re not, silly thing,” Glinda murmured beside her ear.

“I am,” Elphaba insisted, though her tone had changed since first she spoke. “Thanks to you, I am. What you did… what you did in the city was… miraculous.”

“Elphie, come now, you know you don’t believe in miracles.”

“I believe in you.”

Glinda let out a peal of laughter. “Psshhh! Flatterer!” she declared. “You might have thought up a more original response! Any lovesick fool could have answered with that!” Yet, in spite of her laughter, Glinda’s voice sounded fragile – as though the sincerity in Elphaba’s words had cut her to the heart.

(Any lovesick fool could have answered with that.)

(But any lovesick fool had not.)

(Elphaba had.)

(And Elphaba was no fool.)

(And… “Lovesick.”)

The word trembled in the clear air.

It was such a flippant word, and its flippancy suggested flimsiness, falseness. Hollowness. Not so much falseness, really, as _incompleteness._ It told part of a story but not the whole. It could not capture the depths of Elphaba, or the depths of what passed between her and Glinda, what she felt for her – and yet, at the same time, it held some kind of beautiful truth. It was such a vulnerable word – a word for starry nights at Shiz, for wandering and whimsical poets – and that vulnerability was a part of Elphaba, even as she shrank from it… It was true for her. It was true for Glinda too. It _had_ been true. It still _was_ true – and by an idle slip of words it was out in the open – unable to be unacknowledged.

The two women had taken their love as a fact of nature (“fact of nature” sounded so clinical – not that either Elphaba or Glinda considered themselves aesthetes), but until now, there had been no time to contemplate it. Now, there was no chaos in the square, no soldiers following their footfalls, no night that would not end, no dragon in the darkness. 

There was simply the two of them.

In the crystal air.

Elphaba and Glinda had reunited the moment Elphaba seized Glinda’s hand amid the gunfire, but in many ways, their reunion was only beginning now.

“I _do_ love you,” Elphaba said softly, and what a relief it was to _say it_ , to speak it freely, to have it flow from her lips like the juice of freshly-plucked berries at a harmonious picnic. She longed to cry it to the clear air so it could shake leaves from the treetops, so it could join with the burble of the river and resound. (What silly images these all were in her mind’s eye, bad poets’ verses, _lovesick fools’_ daydreams, and Elphaba would not change them for the world!) There was a giddiness to the mere act of saying, “I love you,” and she wanted to exult in that giddiness, for the happiness was strange and surely it wouldn’t last and so she needed to make it last, to keep the words alive over and over. “I love you. I love you… I love you! And I know you are an extraordinarily gifted witch. I… I know I… I wouldn’t be here now… if not for you. I know I am not as strong as you are. When we were fleeing through the Emerald City, you pulled me along. All I could do was follow…”

She had known the happiness would not last – and now she had made sure of it. Of course, she had sabotaged herself.

Glinda frowned. “Don’t discredit yourself to raise me up, Elphie,” she pleaded. “Please don’t. You saved me first. You’re the reason I’m still alive.”

Elphaba said nothing.

Glinda raised a hand to Elphaba’s cheek. (Glinda’s hands were _so soft_.) “You’ve done so much, Elphie. So much.”

“Not enough.”

Elphaba hated saying that because she knew Glinda would try to prove her wrong – because, by saying it, Elphaba put a weight upon Glinda’s heart and that was the last thing Elphaba wanted to do… but it was true, wasn’t it?

“A boy is dead because of me. And after his death, I put the burden of our survival on you.”

Glinda felt Elphaba react positively to her touch, felt the tightness in Elphaba’s face fade when she placed her hand there, and so now she rested her own face against Elphaba’s, letting the tension ebb away as she whispered, “That boy was shot by the Gale Force, Elphie. They killed him, not you.”

“But I let him die…”

Elphaba’s whole body shuddered, but Glinda held close.

“No, you didn’t. He wanted to kill me, you kept him back. You were protecting me, and when you saw who was behind those wrappings, you did everything you could to save him. We both did.”

“But it wasn’t enough…” Elphaba whimpered.

Glinda drew back, saw the tears welling in Elphaba’s eyes, and caught them like starlight before they fell to her skin.

Such was the gift and magic of a witch.

“It was enough,” Glinda murmured. “It was everything in our power. How could that not be enough? And after his death, you didn’t ‘put the burden of our survival’ on me, Elphie. You were in a state of shock, a state of horror that was completely understandable. You went through the experience of something horrible. _Don’t hate yourself because of your own pain, Elphie._ You’re not a bad person because of it. I know self-hatred. It’s an old friend – old foe, I don’t know – of mine. It eats at you, but it is a liar. You did so much to protect me, to protect us, to protect everyone. You threw yourself in front of that cabby when the soldiers were beating him. He’s alive because _you_ rushed to his defense. I could not have reached him if not for you. You put yourself in the way of the solders. You did that to save me – and any innocent there. You’ve done enough, Elphie. You’ve done _more_ than enough. And you deserve to rest.”

Another spasm tore through Elphie’s body and Glinda wondered what it must be like not to be able to cry.

Always choking back sobs…

Knowing that tears, the relief _everyone else_ had, did not give you relief…

Only gave you more pain…

Burning like acid down your face…

So that you sobbed more and wept more and burned more…

Even babies could weep…

An idea occurred to her; an idea Glinda would hardly have entertained if not for Elphie’s faith.

She was a witch, was she not?

Might she?

She might.

“Elphie,” she whispered, “I love you.”

_This is how much._

Glinda took Elphie in her arms and kissed her. It startled Elphaba at first, but soon she was deepening the kiss, wrapping her arms around Glinda’s body, letting herself ignite with the passion of it… It was a kiss sweeter than memories – and memories had been the sweetest things Elphaba could savor in the Resistance. In her narrow room, her coffin room, memories had been warmer than the candle-flame… but even they were cold as hoar-frost, their warmth illusory… This kiss was real and true and now, warmer than the sun beating down upon them.

And when they parted and Elphaba felt the tears upon her cheeks like the splash of lagoon water upon a wanderer’s scorched face, finding an oasis in the desert, she marveled.

The kiss of a witch.

For a moment, Elphaba forgot all her guilt and self-flagellation. She kissed Glinda again. Glinda’s lips were more luscious than pomegranates, than any bounty an oasis had to offer.

And, as she kissed Glinda a second time, the tears flowed freely – as they had not done in childhood. For the first time in her life, she wept without pain, without etching a latticework of scars into her face – and laughed with joy at the weeping.

Glinda let Elphaba’s tears pour forth, let Elphaba rest her head against her chest while she cried.

Elphie needed this more than anything.


	9. Chapter 9

Several days passed.

They found a small cave not far from the river and did all they could to make it their home. The moss of ages overhung its archway, so different a green than the Emerald City they left behind. It was like the green of Elphie’s skin or Glinda’s magic. Within, the cave proved snug and warm. A lushness cushioned its floor and walls without fostering dampness or ooze. When a small fire was lit, a yellow glow permeated the place, making it feel more like a country cottage than a gash in the earth.

Roots and berries were plentiful thereabouts, so they ate fairly well – carving out bowls and utensils of wood, conjuring whatever else they needed with the aid of Glinda’s magic, and sometimes even cooking up a nice stew. Piping hot, the stew filled their bellies and, after eating, they could lie back to listen to the twitter of birds above or the gentle flow of the river in the distance.

Life became routine, but even the coziness of routine could not hide from Glinda Elphie’s ongoing unease.

Elphaba did her best to hide it. After weeping, she seemed better, but weeping was only a first step in the healing process. Glinda knew that, and as she saw Elphie dedicate herself more and more to routine, she grew anxious. Elphaba assured Glinda that she was fine – as she had done before first breaking down – and that parallel disquieted Glinda. It was not that Elphie was reverting to her previous emotional state, per se. In many ways, she did seem calmer, more at ease – but continually, she refused to confront her past experiences, and the prospect of Elphie sealing herself off again left Glinda dubious. At the same time, Glinda knew that these things took time. She did not wish to force Elphie to move too quickly, and so, she began taking small steps to unobtrusively comfort her. Whenever she saw Elphie retreating into stoicism, she would squeeze her hand a little more tightly as if to tell her, “I’m here for you.” She would smile softly to say, “Do you see, Elphie? You can share your emotions. I’m not pressuring you to, but it’s not healthy to bury them.” She would tousle Elphie’s hair in the cheery glow of the cavern. She would nuzzle her in her sleep to ward off the bad dreams. All these things, she would have done anyway, but they took on a special resonance for her now, and she hoped they did the same for Elphaba.

 At last, one day when they were simply walking, Elphaba wandered some paces away from Glinda. She paused, head turned from her and eyes looking into the distance at nothing in particular. Her dark hair blew behind her in the wind, and she murmured, “I’m sorry.”

Glinda drew closer and placed a hand on Elphaba’s shoulder. “Elphie, you have nothing to be sorry for…”

Elphaba laughed wryly. “I’m sorry for the apology, then.” She did not say it glibly, but helplessly, futilely – and when she looked back on Glinda, her eyes were soft and sad. Glinda saw her own helplessness reflected in those eyes for the long moment where Elphaba could say nothing. Finally, Elphaba spoke again. “I’m sorry for… I don’t know…” – and it seemed she did not know, for her voice meandered and drifted into silence, wistful silence.

Glinda wanted to protest, but said nothing, gave Elphie time to get her words out.

“I see what you do for me,” Elphie said suddenly, turning her eyes abruptly from Glinda once more, as though she could not face her. “I see what you have been trying to do these past few days. And I am grateful. Do not think that I am not grateful. But I am not… used to…”

To what?

To opening up?

Was this the conditioning of the Resistance speaking?

To happiness?

Was this Elphie’s childhood speaking? Was this… Elphie’s life… speaking?

Glinda did not know.

She was not sure Elphie knew herself.

 But she waited.

“You do… so much,” Elphaba whispered, still not fixing eyes on Glinda, “and I am so grateful, and I don’t want you to stop…” She began fiddling with her hands, vacantly, almost seeming unaware of it, it was just some pattern, some routine. “But I feel guilty – I know I shouldn’t, know it’s… ridiculous… but I do… because I can’t do for you… what you are doing for me… and it’s like I can’t even appreciate what you are doing for me…”

“I know that you appreciate me, Elphie,” Glinda said softly.

“I love you,” Elphaba said simply. She did not turn. Her hands continued to fiddle – but Glinda saw her shoulders slacken for just a moment. “For… for so long, I had a purpose. I had a path, a direction, a goal. It was the same path I walked when I was young, head held high against the gibes of the world. At Shiz, it was the same, in the Resistance, the same. A path of righteousness – not as Nessie would have it, not as father would have it. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of… rightness… The path was long and straight and pointed as an arrow, and I kept on it – and then, an avalanche – and then I thought: _You are my purpose._ You, Glinda. And you _are_ , and so is rightness – and I know that these are not two diverging paths, but the world makes them feel so – the world, with its pettiness, its senseless death… Oh, listen to me soliloquizing!”

She let out a shriek of laughter.

Glinda put an arm around Elphaba’s shoulder. A part of her doubted her strength as a comforter. After all, how could she comfort someone she already knew to be so strong? How could she, of all people, remind her of her strength? But she would be there for Elphie for as long as she needed. For always.

“You said it yourself, Elphie. There aren’t two diverging paths.”

They walked together until they reached the river’s edge. Glinda’s gift to Elphaba had cured her of her allergy to water, but still Elphie kept her distance. Old habits were hard to break. But now, Elphaba stooped down, swirling the water with her finger.

Her finger did not melt away like brown sugar.

Elphaba raised her hand from the water, gazed at the droplets glistening on her palm.

“That’s the Resistance in me, I suppose,” she mused. “To survive, the Resistance needs a steely self-conception of its own morality, and in that need, it can become rigid and dogmatic. I want the righteousness without the self-righteousness, without the dogma. I’ve… seen what the dogma can do…”

A silence.

“I can still see his eyes.”

Glinda did not need to ask Elphaba whose eyes she meant.

She thought of that boy in the Resistance, how the accusation of treachery had shone in his eyes until nothing shone in them but the blank reflection of the moon.

How much hate for her had been in them, and hate for Elphaba, but mostly helplessness… the sheen of coming lifelessness…

“I wish I could wash it all away.”

Elphaba’s cloak flopped upon the grass.

Glinda blinked, startled as a completely nude Elphaba waded into the river.

“Elphie? What are you doing?”

“Washing myself clean.”

Elphaba had never felt the water before. It clung to her legs, exquisitely cold. It caressed her feet, her toes…

It tickled between her toes like the threads of plant life on the river floor.

She dove deeper.

The water glided over her buttocks, her back, her hair…

Her hair billowed about her like the ink of an octopus…

The water wove about her body like a garment of silk and yet it was not silk. It was not any garment.

It was water against skin, crisp and cool.

Elphaba’s relationship with her body was… complicated.

A mixture of internalized shame and pride.

She knew herself to be gangly, gaunt, and green. She had hated and loved herself for that at various stages of her life…

Wished to scrub the green away, wished to keep it.

Murky as the mud of the river bottom that stuck to her before she went deeper in…

Murky as the world… Glinda and rightness, her pride… The cruelty of death, her shame…

The shadows of her mind were the murk.

Like the shadows in the water…

Some, a darker blue and green… Some, set against brilliant blue as sunlight filtered down…

She swam on.

Away from the murk, where the water was wide, a world of opal and sapphire…

Here, there were no canting preachers, no smirking schoolchildren, there was no tyranny, no zealotry, no Wizard, no Resistance, no senseless death…

There was only the sunlight spilling upon the water.

And Glinda.

Whose eyes did not judge, did not condemn, and so confounded Elphaba’s own self-condemnation.

The water was smooth against her skin and Elphaba felt serene in her nakedness…

Mermaid-like, she burst to the surface and breathed in the tranquil air.

She half-expected the magnificence of everything to perish and die – for the world of the water to be lost to the world above.

But the sunlight still shimmered.

And Glinda still stood.

Elphaba let the sunlight wash over her, welcoming the chill of the air intermingling with the warmth of the golden rays…

Her body was her own.

She strode to the bank, where Glinda watched transfixed.

Elphie was so beautiful, hair cascading behind her, luxuriant and black.

Smiling brighter than pearl.

She seemed – not made anew. No. _Herself_.

Or perhaps made anew. But only if she wanted to be. If it was of her own making.

In any case, it was _dazzling._

“Come join me!”

Glinda jumped.

“Oh, Elphie, no, I can’t possibly –” she babbled.

Elphie splashed her like a playful seal, laughing, and soon Glinda found herself laughing too. She gave in.

“Oh, very well, then!” she sighed, beginning to fling off her clothes.

They scattered on the grass beside Elphie’s.

Glinda moved awkwardly into the water, hugging herself tightly. This body of hers, she had called a bone-casing not a week back. The meat hung to cushion the bones, the meat that only existed to decay, leaving the frame behind…

She felt clammy and strange in the frigid water and the burning sun.

But Elphie’s hand reached out and what could Glinda do but take it?

Elphie drew her farther out and Glinda let the water slide over her shoulders. Once immersed, Glinda admitted to herself that she felt better, bobbing oddly beside Elphie. The coldness of the water felt refreshing and sweet in the heat of the day. Uncertainly, hesitantly, she began to do more than bob – began swimming in earnest, dipping her head under for an instant.

“You look like a mermaid,” Elphaba beamed.

“I?” Glinda asked, taken aback. “Hardly!”

Elphaba kept smiling. “Oh, but you do,” she said. “When I first awoke after you brought us here, I thought it, and I think it all the more now. Look at yourself – hair of gold spilling down, skin as pink as a conch, gliding in the water!”

Glinda blushed, then looked down at herself. Perhaps Elphie was right.

It had been so long since she loved herself.

(Elphie could be so _soft_ when the world let her.)

“You’re more the mermaid of the two of us,” Glinda sang out. She wanted Elphie to know that, to have that love in her heart.

Elphie’s eyes gleamed with heartfelt gratitude.

They splashed and swam and laughed and laughed. At last, they rose from the river, letting the sun dry them. Still nude, they ran and danced across the meadow, falling together into the golden grass. The sky was above them, an ocean washing over their eyes, cleansing them even more. Lying there, the gentle air soothing to their bare skin, they joined hands and rested…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far, this is my favorite chapter and I'm glad that, in it, I could finally give Elphaba and Glinda some peace.
> 
> Also, although I had the idea for this chapter for a few weeks now, I want to thank irhaboggle for the delightful fic "Rumors," which gave me the push to go forward with my initial concept and gave me the courage to explore my own more positive take on Elphie's relationship with water.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy and please review!


	10. Chapter 10

_Intermezzo_

The glass cat slipped from room to room, barely disturbing the stillness of the cavern-world.

Its footfalls left nary a mark on the emerald tiling.

Its paws were not dipped in blood, as they had been the night the Resistance members came to lie in wait. They had not known another lay in wait for – well, not for them, but they were finer mice to pounce upon. After all, there were more of them.

Nice morsels to carve with claws, though bayonets had done most of the carving in the end.

They came to catch a betrayer and found themselves betrayed.

_“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”_ the old man had barked with his carnival-barker zeal.

The cat did not know the language.  It was from the old man’s country, not the cat’s. The cat simply let the old man pat its head, as it had let the Gale Force captain scratch its silvery chin after tiptoeing through the blood and idly mewing.

 There was the old man now, and the woman.

The cat slid onto a perch and coiled there, scaly-green in the light.

The cat took on the hue of its surroundings.

Not unlike the man and woman.

Hollow things, they seemed to the cat, but hollow things could be substantial. Take that bloated head rotting in a darkened room when the old man did not put it up for show. It had been a doozy for the cat to clamber over that in the darkness, shell though it might have been. Yes, hollow things could be of substance, could be _most_ effective.

The cat licked its paw, thinking that it was a hollow thing as well.

Spun glass and ruby? Flesh and blood? Papier-mâché?

The cat knew so many hollow things that it hardly cared what was what.

People hardly cared too. The cat noticed that about them.

People would flock to their own culling – always so contemptuous of Animals, treating them like animals, accusing them of not having the minds to perceive the Higher Things, but put the people in an abattoir and would they realize it before it was too late? Doubtful. Throw a bit of flash and flourish at them and the mob was more rapt than the cat when shown a ball of yarn.

The old man understood that, at least. The cat respected that about him.

Flash and flourish masked the flash of the slaughtering knife.

No matter, no matter.

The cat would be there to wade through the blood and watch…


	11. Chapter 11

Glinda and Elphaba could have stayed like that forever – hand in hand beneath the upturned ocean of the sky. They wanted to. The blue cascaded down the great dome of the firmament in waterfalls crested by the cotton-white foam of clouds. The waterfalls gushed azure, spilling down and spilling up, defying gravity. The sea of the heavens was above them, but also all around them – theirs to bathe within.

Yet, as the day drew on, the blue of the sky turned red. Their sea became a wine-dark sea, as the Oziad might have put it, the kind sweat-scraggled voyagers would fear to sail upon. They donned their clothes out of necessity in the end; for as the sun sank lower, the forest grew cold and dim.

It had been a curious sensation, wandering the woodland without clothes…

For so long, Glinda had associated nakedness with abjection – with the degradation of political prisoners, with Animals stripped of their clothes and treated as dumb beasts.

She had made those associations because the Wizard had made them. The Wizard’s eyes hung over the captives in their cells. Morrible’s eyes hung over them – even when neither the Wizard or Morrible were present. It was an atmosphere of perpetual observation, the absence of eyes only enhancing the sense of surveillance. In that atmosphere, the prisoner became what the watcher wanted them to be even (and perhaps most especially) if the watcher was a specter, a suggestion… Oz, the Great and Terrible might have kept himself behind walls as thick as any dungeon’s, might have sealed himself off from the world, but if, in his gaze, you were nothing, then he kept the _feeling_ of his gaze fixed on you.

From those eyes of judgement came shame.

But _going_ naked was not being _made_ to go naked, for the action lay in oneself. It was a repudiation of the feeling those eyes imposed, a chance to look back upon the looker with scorching gaze and burn them into dust, searing them with their own shame and imposing it upon the imposer until the feeling they wanted you to feel was theirs and you felt… as you wanted to… As _you_ wanted to.

Still, even that consideration of it seemed off to Glinda, for it still presupposed a watcher to repudiate. She shivered to think of how deeply the Wizard’s workings had wormed their way into her mind. Here, there was no watcher. There was nothing even for the associations of one to grasp because the associations had no essences in themselves. The peace of the glade dismantled the whole panopticon. It exposed the humbuggery of the hoke’s self-righteous shaming. How strange it was to see social constructs wither and die, failing to take root in this earth…

For a moment, Glinda mused over the connotations of “naked” and “nude” – “naked,” somehow the word for shame in her heart and “nude,” a word for wild-haired fairies… goddesses of sylvan realms… and yet… here and now… what was the difference between them?

Both words had an aura of liberation about them now, and Glinda knew this new connotation was only her experience, that others had connotations born of their experiences – she was not the Wizard – she had no wish to impose herself on others –  but this – this feeling born of running nude, naked within the golden glade – this was _hers_.

_Hers and Elphie’s._

Elphie had not seen inside the Wizard’s prison cells, but shame had been hers since childhood – the atmosphere of perpetual surveillance inevitably upon her, as it was for everyone in the world of the Wizard’s making – but on her most acutely. For Elphaba, the eyes did not need to remain unseen, the watchers did not need the artifice of civility. For her, it did not matter if they retained it. Civility was only the illusion for the people. The green woman had never been “the people” and so, like the Animals, she was not deigned civility’s pretense.

Her skin was marvelously green – not like emeralds – not even like the forest, beautiful and comparable though the forest was. Like itself. Smooth and green. And wandering there, leaving her garments so far behind her – so far that she could not gather them up – was bravery. It was more of a crucible for Elphie to undermine the foundation of the panopticon than for Glinda, though Elphaba had done it first. Its precepts, the world had entrenched in her since before she could speak, telling her to police herself – and even her youthful efforts to take that self-policing and turn it into self-governance were tainted by her knowledge of the attitudes of the world. In armoring herself against the world, in guarding herself, Elphaba had… guarded herself in just the way the apparatus wanted. (Saying “wanted” personified it – gave it eyes – gave it a will. It had no will, though it was meant to seem like it did.) She hid herself to infiltrate the masses, “the people,” but in hiding herself, she internalized the contempt of the Wizard’s world – without meaning to, without knowing it. She bound herself in moral certainty – such was life in the Resistance – and those bindings, like the heavy hood and cowl she wore on missions, masked the corrosive quality of self-contempt creeping in… It was bravery to let those bindings fall away, let the internalization fall away along with her clothing, to stand in her verdigris under the sun.

It was bravery and relief.

Relief, reclamation, absolution.

For both of them.

_Theirs._

A mutual understanding of each other, of themselves… a sense of self-love…

But the shadows grew long as the sun sank below the trees and they had to put on their clothes again.

And as Elphaba pulled on her boots, head bowed to the ground, Glinda heard her murmur, “We have to go back.”

And Glinda knew that was true.

The clarity of the air had given them clarity of mind, given them peace, but so many were not at peace.

Glinda thought of a young Fox she had seen whimpering in a cell, how she had comforted him all she could before the guards came, before they shoved her along to meet with Morrible… She had thought of Elphie then, and the Lion cub…

She thought of an old Stoat bleeding from tortures, begging for death… She had given it to him before his torturers came again… casting a spell to give him peace… hoping none would see…

Elphaba thought of an aging Boar she had known fleetingly in the Resistance, thought of a family of Oxen that had stubbornly refused to flee from Oz and vanished, thought of the countless Disappeared, human and Animal…

She rose, her garb grey as the trees at dusk, her face somber.

Glinda rose soon after, wrapped in the same common things she had bought all those nights ago as a disguise, her face a mirror of Elphaba’s.

But theirs was not the solemnity of despair now – as it had been on that nightmarish night.

It was the solemnity of resolve tinged with regret.

And behind the solemnity of their eyes, a softness which said, “I am with you. I love you,” without them having to say a word.

Glinda raised her arm, painting the air with light, and her bubble circled around them.


	12. Chapter 12

The bubble floated over hills and valleys, towns and farms. Many were the times that luminous orb had been met with flocks of adoring citizens, all chasing after it, all eager to catch a glimpse of the gracious Glinda the Good – but now, it flew too high for anyone to see, sailing silently through the cloudy billows.

The clouds towered like mountain-giants turned to marble. Through the sheen of the bubble, Glinda saw their distorted shapes. She thought of all the stories Ama Clutch had whispered to her in childhood – of Yoops cannibalizing travelers in Quadling Country (what would happen if you enchanted a Yoop and turned it into a marble statue, would you end up with something like the mountainous clouds?), of islands in the sky ruled by Blue Boolooroos who would dice you up for pleasure and lived for six hundred years… These were silly fancies, but like spies from the Dainty China Country, like the amorphous dragon, they plagued the anxious mind. Looking at the glistening wraiths beyond the bubble’s translucence, Glinda felt the intangibility of her and Elphie’s future. Her stomach fluttered and dropped inside of her as they bobbed along, dancing with the twinkling light of the sphere and the wisps of cloud cut off from the great hulks around her.

Glinda’s hand had been in Elphie’s all through the long journey away from peril, her rose-pink bubble their only refuge against the black void of rain-swept night, against the sprawl of unknown skies, clutching Elphie’s hand even when Elphie had fallen into unconsciousness. Now, she held it on the journey back into peril.

They could not risk plunging into the heart of the metropolis. They needed to get their bearings – and so they settled down upon the dull expanse of land they had passed on their first journey to the Emerald City all those years ago, with its lean cattle and leaner houses – skeletal and ramshackle. Under the sun, it seemed less obviously drear than it had in those grey days. The sun gleaned as much color as it could from the dry grass and farmland. The fertile blue of the sky cast a hue of life over the lifelessness that was appropriate for a region so close to a showman’s towers of spectacle and artifice.

The farms were spread far apart and so were isolated enough to approach without fear of commotion. At the same time, their proximity to the Yellow Brick Road meant they must have a steady stream of information coming in from passing travelers. The two women drew nearer to one where a man was out splitting wood. From a distance and in the brilliance of the sunlight, he almost seemed one of the Wizard’s propaganda posters come to life: a hardworking _human_ Ozian, mighty arms rippling, made magnificent by his labor. The closer they got, however, the more they saw the shadows under his eyes, saw the corpse-like quality in his sunken face. The man’s youth and rich black beard only made him the hollower, like the illusory luster on his sun-tinged cheeks. Still, he worked without complaint.

“Ah, sir!” Glinda squeaked.

The man looked up, sweat dripping from his ivory face. His dark eyes grew wide in an expression Glinda thought she knew too well. He set aside his axe.

“It’s you,” he grunted, his voice softer than one might have expected from his countenance. “They said… you were almost killed. They said they had you in hiding for your protection.”

_Is that what they said?_ Glinda thought bitterly.

She let out a long and melodramatic sigh. “Oh, you have no idea how hideoteous these past several days have been – absolutely horrendible! These terrorists and their terror, it’s terrible! Why can’t they leave us in peace? I _am_ in hiding, you know! That’s why I have these clothes. Simply not my style at all – but I’m traveling incognozito! Technically, I’m not even supposed to be out and about yet, but I cannot resist going among you dear little folk. You get a very drab view of things when it’s just being reported to you behind walls, you know, so you must tell me everything that’s been happening. Do you mind if we come in for a bit?”

The door to the farmhouse opened and a woman stepped out. Like the man, she was young, with thick and luxuriant hair, but her face was pinched and mottled by the climate – making her look a good deal older. At the window, Glinda spied a cluster of impish faces, all pressed together, noses squished against the glass.

The woman whispered something to the man. She looked anxious. He answered, “Set the table, Nora, dear. We have guests. Glinda the Good is here, and…”

Elphaba bowed her head.

“She’s a friend!” Glinda chimed in suddenly.

The man smiled tiredly. “Well, any friend of Glinda the Good is a friend of mine.”

 The house was painted white so that in the light of the day, it seemed smooth as cream poured from a pitcher. As with the farmer’s physique, however, that changed the closer one ventured to it. The peeling of the paint became clearer, the leathery wood more distinct. On the inside, it was little better. They all stooped and entered through a narrow door into a cramped space, made all the more so by the gaggle of children running at their feet.

Glinda beamed down at them. The children hung back; an impoverished sullenness having overtaken them. Their hair was matted, their faces grimy. Sackcloth donned by mournful maunts would have been preferable to the filthy rags they wore. One girl, at least, managed to smile at Glinda, but her elder sister quickly shooed her away and told her to get the bowls and plates from the cupboard.

When Elphaba entered, a few of the children began to prod at her, but most hung back, the same as before, eyes round and staring.

“My friend just got home from abroad,” Glinda interjected hastily. “Her skin is just getting used to our Ozian sun again. Isn’t it exotifying?”

Glinda knew she had to have some way to explain away Elphaba’s greenness, but she still despised herself for using the term “exotifying.” She locked eyes with Elphaba, silently begging her forgiveness. Elphaba merely nodded, affirming the story and validating Glinda’s words, but still Glinda felt disgusted with herself.

As his children scuttered about the table, finding their seats, the farmer opened the window out of which they had all been peering. He leaned against the sill, letting the sun touch his sallow face once more – and in that moment, Glinda found something poetic in him. No, not poetic. That word was too dehumanizing, and there was something gently human in his simply letting himself exist. A crow flopped onto the sill next to him, the very kind he would have wanted to scare off from his fields, and he took it in his hands like a baby bluebird. He showed it around the room, letting his children laugh at it in spite of their stoicism, then flicked it away. The deathly aspect returned to his face thereafter, and all the graveness of a miserable life, but in that moment, there was something more and it did Glinda’s heart good. 

The table was a coarse brown rectangle jutting up from the floor, sparsely covered with fruits and a little bare corn. Glinda could smell something sizzling elsewhere in the house and, in time, the farmer’s wife ducked into the kitchen, returning with a bit of sausage to put on everyone’s plates.

Glinda hesitated to eat the sausage. “These are… these are from the hogs in the yard, yes?” she inquired.

“Of course, ma’am,” the woman murmured uncertainly. “Where else would they be from?”

Using Animal meat had been thrown about in secret meetings as a means of combating food shortages across the land, though Glinda did not know if the Wizard had ever put that horrible whispering into policy. The mere thought, however, the conceptualization in her mind…

In her mind, red flesh oozed from a monstrous grinder.

_What if it was – and they did not know?_

Glinda nibbled on some corn.

Elphaba refused to touch the meat at all.

“So,” Glinda said at last, “how has Oz been holding up in my absence?”

A silence filled the table. One of the boys tugged his sister’s hair. The woman glanced at her husband. He had a cup of warm milk beside him. He downed it like a dram.

“Not well,” he said hoarsely, his voice trembling like a cobweb in the corner. “We get… we get bad news most every day now.”

Glinda’s heart stung. She imagined the Wizard tightening his grip on Oz, his paranoia reaching hysterical levels.

“If there’s anything I can do –,” she said.

“No, ma’am,” the farmer said solemnly, “though that’s… that’s very kind of you…”

With the food, the wife had brought out a little token and put it on the mantel. The farmer looked askance at it now, and Glinda’s eyes followed. Glinda recognized it immediately in spite of its small size – a small silhouette of Glinda herself, encircled in gold, mass-produced by the millions by the Wizard, cracked and looking a little worse for wear.

Glinda felt a great rush of affection for these people and obligation to them.

“In this house, we’ve always loved and respected Glinda the Good,” the farmer said softly. “When we heard what had happened to you, we were devastated. So much bloodshed in the square in the Emerald City… and later…”

“Later?” Glinda asked cautiously.

“When you left us, ma’am.”

The man’s head sank forward, lost in thought, his dark hair hanging about his face. His white arm rested limply on the table through his reverie. Glinda took hold of it, speaking with all the sincerity in her.

“I should not have done that. I promise you, I vow to you, I will be here for you, for all the people of Oz.”

The man breathed deeply. Glinda felt a clamminess in his hands.

“The people of Oz, ma’am?”

He raised his eyes to her and she saw they were misted with tears. His mouth was slightly agape, straining to form words, and there was such a look of confusion on his face. At last, instead of words a hollow laugh rasped from his throat.

He tugged his hand away, slamming his other fist down with the explosion of a powder-keg. Elphaba sprang up, as did the eldest daughter, who barred the way to the door. The wife and younger children sat paralyzed.

“The _people_ you slaughtered in the street, ma’am? The people who screamed as you turned their skin to tree bark, turned their heads into tulip bulbs? There were so many people in that street, ma’am, and it was like you sent a hurricane through there. I know you didn’t _mean_ to do it. I know the insurrectionists have you under some spell. I know you think you’re doing Good, but you’re not.”

Glinda sighed, more fatigued than afraid. “Tell me more of what Madame Morrible has been telling the people.”

“She told us everything. How the insurrectionists captured you. How they tortured you and brainwashed you with enchantments. Is this the handler they gave you, then?”

“I am no one’s handler,” said Elphaba coldly.

“There were reports at first you attacked a squadron, wild rumors that you had turned traitor to Oz.”

“The country or the man, the ‘great and terrible’?” Glinda muttered under her breath.

Amid the muttering, she heard the woman whisper, “Please, this wasn’t the plan, we just wanted to get them to leave,” but her husband paid her no heed.

“No, this wasn’t the plan, Nora,” he declared, his voice still soft and low, but like distant thunder on the wind. “This is personal. I took your portrait down myself and threw it in the ash-heap after I heard those first rumors.”

_Well, that explains the crack, then_ , Glinda mused. Her heart sank even lower. _Had the farmer’s wife put the portrait back up out of fear of her?_

“We were all of us crushed. But then we heard that the Wizard’s press secretary had stood before a crowd with the news that you were no traitor, that the insurrectionists had brainwashed and manipulated you, we were so relieved. _I_ was so relieved. We knew that wasn’t you.”

The man rose, walking stiffly like an animated corpse to the mantel, fixing the dark eyes in his cadaverous face on Glinda’s portraiture. He took it in his hands and held it to the light – so that she could see the fine detail on the edges of her hair, so that the gold glinted before her…

“This is you.”

Glinda looked at the elaborate shadow of her hair and then deep into those dark eyes, so lost, seeking anything to give their owner a purpose in a desolate life. “That’s a manufactured illusion concocted by an old man,” she said simply – and made a dash for the door.

The farmer’s oldest daughter was there – a girl of fifteen with hair like moldy straw, but beneath the grime, she was beautiful – untouched as yet by the ravages that beset her parents. Glinda thought of the way she had whispered in her little sister’s ear at their arrival, remembered the little sister’s smile at first. Had that whisper put the little girl in her place, reminded her of Glinda’s wickedness? Did this young woman think that, as the eldest, she was the responsible one, capable of understanding what innocent children could not?

Glinda could have shoved her aside – _should_ have shoved her aside – but she was so young and, in spite of her actions, so innocent...

“Go on, then,” the girl said softly. “I’ve heard what you did to those men, how vines wove around their throats and strangled them. Kill me as you did them. There’s wood here. Bind me into the wall, lock me there until twelve winters have withered and gone. Go on. If this is what you are, go on.”

It wasn’t a taunt. That was what broke Glinda’s heart. It was a desperate plea to her humanity, born out of anguish, and how could she respond to that?

“I never did any of that,” Glinda said helplessly. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You can’t do it,” the girl said softly. “You can’t do it because this isn’t you. It never was. Come back to us.”

“Hold the door, Sybillina,” her father bellowed. ‘They’ll be here soon.”

“They?” his wife shrieked, seeming truly taken by surprise, taken aback. “Who’s ‘they’? What in Oz’s name have you done?!”

“I got word in the tavern night before last that them up in the Emerald City were sending out spies. Anyone could reach them if they had any information on the Witch of the North… and well, when she walks right into my front yard…”

“Spies?” cried his wife. “What madness is this?”

“That crow at the windowsill,” the farmer growled, “was no crow.”

Until now, Elphaba had remained as still as the farmer’s other children – eyes sliding over every possible exit, quiet and collected. Now, the threat had grown. Now, she lunged forward toward the window, the farmer slamming into her, grappled with him as his wife screamed, “Don’t hurt him!”, as Glinda leapt to protect her. Elphaba managed to knock the farmer to ground. He lay dazed, blood on his teeth, eyes bewildered and strangely soft.

“I just wanted to help you…” he gasped to Glinda. “They can help you… The Wizard is a wonderful wizard… You know that… Listen to him…”

Sybillina had rushed to her father’s side. Glinda wanted to comfort her, wanted even to comfort the bleeding man, but could not. With chaos around them, Glinda and Elphaba burst through the door and found themselves in the blinding sun.

But the sun was not blinding for long.

Clouds streaked across the sky, gathering themselves, growing closer, like a murder of crows on the horizon.

Lightning forked from their shadow and Glinda thought of one with a certain specialty for the weather…

(“It was like you sent a hurricane through there,” the farmer had said. But Glinda had not. She knew who would have, however, to annihilate all trace of Glinda’s rescuing the people in the street… to finish off the witnesses of Glinda’s attack on the Gale Force… to send terror into the hearts of anyone who saw, survived, and fled… to make the story what she needed it to be…)

A thunderbolt scorched the earth and they saw a line of uniformed soldiers, guns drawn and pointed directly at them – and at the center of the soldiers, fabulously attired in shimmering green and gold and with a great feather boa about her pasty throat, was Madame Morrible herself, striding forward as nonchalantly as if she were arriving to tea…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my longest chapter so far and my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE chapter to write so far. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please review, please tell me what you think. Your comments are as beautiful to me as "For Good" and I cannot express how honored I am that you have taken this story into your hearts. Thank you, thank you all.


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